A project about the collecting and safeguarding crop genetic resources in Italian linguistic islands by Institute of Plant Genetics (IGV) of the National Research Council of Bari (Italy) and the Crop Science Institute of Kassel University (Germany) started in 1996 with a first mission in Italian to-wns (Basilicata region) of Albanian origin. Later on, other regions (mainly Calabria, Molise and Si-cily) were visited with the same aim. The Albanian linguistic islands still preserve valuable crop genetic resources which is nowadays severely threatened by genetic erosion.